KAITIAKITANGA

Private Shaw deposited them on the red gravel driveway of the house nestled into the bush, and said goodbye with a regulation wave.

Tane wondered where she was going to and hoped it was south, away from the fog.

The house was silent. The enveloping trees blocked the dwindling light of the fading sun, spreading longer finger-like shadows across the weatherboards and giving it a forlorn, moody appearance.

A note on the front door explained the silence. Gone to Waitakere Marae.

Like many others, his dad and mum had sought a place of refuge in uncertain times.

“I’ll get the car.” Tane unlocked the front door and opened the garage door for the others to enter. His mum’s car, a bright red Volkswagen, occupied the left of the garage. There was a larger space for his dad’s Jeep, but it was not there.

The spare keys to the VW were on the hook inside the pantry, and Tane tossed them to Fatboy.

Rebecca sat silently in the back, playing hand games with Xena.

“Do you think that Crowe and his men, and the army, will be able to hold back the fog?” Tane eventually asked the question that was on all of their minds.

“They don’t know how,” Rebecca answered, and there was something about the way she said it that made Tane turn around and look closely at her for a moment.

“Do you?” he asked.

Rebecca didn’t answer, but she didn’t deny it.

“Rebecca,” Fatboy said gently, “is there a way to stop the antibodies? To defeat the macrophages?”

“I don’t know,” Rebecca said, shaking her head. “It’s just something that was in one of the messages. I’m not sure.”

“What!” Tane was flabbergasted. Xena put her hands over her eyes and peeked out from between her fingers.

Tane desperately tried to remember the content of the last message. Or was it something in an earlier message, one that they had failed to decipher?

Fatboy said, “Rebecca, try to remember. You are talking about the lives of hundreds of thousands, millions, maybe billions of people.”

She was silent. Fatboy and Tane looked at each other in growing concern.

“Come on, Rebecca,” Tane said lightly. “Let’s be heroes and save the world!”

She just said, with a weariness that filled the small car around them like a black shroud, “I think the world is doing a pretty good job of saving itself at the moment.”

She said no more after that.

 

They came down out of the mountains and headed south toward the Marae.

The road they were traveling had been the scene of a battle. The aftermath was everywhere. A battle of desperate people, trying to force their way along one of the main feeder roads to the Northwestern Motorway. Earlier in the day, this road must have been jammed solid with cars. Broken-down or fuelless vehicles were shunted haphazardly onto the verges. A few sat in the center of the road, and they had to drive carefully around them. Most showed signs of damage.

When Rebecca finally spoke again, it was to say, “I’m hungry.”

Tane realized then that they hadn’t eaten all day.

“Want a Big Mac?” he asked, seeing a McDonald’s sign ahead of them and trying to be funny.

She just sighed tiredly and said, “It won’t be open.”

Of course it wouldn’t be open. That was the point of his joke, which didn’t seem at all funny now.

The light was on, the great golden M glowing like an ancient tribal beacon down the road before them. The crew must have left in a hurry and forgotten to turn the sign off. There was no way it was going to be open.

It was open.

With an expression of disbelief, Fatboy pulled into the drive-through.

“Can I please take your order?” a bright young girl in a blue McDonald’s uniform asked from behind the small window.

“A Big Mac,” Fatboy said cautiously. “Two Big Macs. Combos. What are you having, Tane?”

“Same same.”

“Make that three.”

“Certainly, sir,” the girl said cheerfully. Her tag said her name was Helen. “Would you like to upsize those to a super-combo?”

Fatboy stared blankly at her for a moment. “All right,” he said.

She took his offered money and said, “Please drive on to the next window.”

The young man at the next window handed them their food, and as they pulled out, Tane and Fatboy looked at each other in amazement.

The whole transaction had been so utterly commonplace that for a moment Tane wondered if he was dreaming the rest of it all, the fog, the antibodies, and that the normalcy, the insanity of the fast-food outlet was really the reality, in an insane world.

But they passed a number of boarded-up houses, eyes peering suspiciously out at them through gaps in the planks, and the nightmare proved to be real once again.

The world is doing a pretty good job of saving itself.

 

Even in these strangest and most desperate of times, some Maori protocol was observed. As a pakeha—a non-Maori—Rebecca needed permission from the tribal elders to enter the sacred ground of the Maori meeting ground. That duly came, although they dispensed with the traditional welcome. There was some discussion over Xena, but she, also, was eventually allowed to trot along beside Rebecca, holding her hand.

His father and mother were in the big meeting hall along with at least a hundred others of the tribe. Tane was acutely aware that Rebecca was the only pakeha there.

It was a tall, timbered, high-roofed hall, lined with traditional carvings, representations of their ancestors. It was dim inside, even under normal circumstances, but now the meager light of the white-hatted electric bulbs scattered around the ceiling was swallowed up by the black plastic sheeting that was taped around each of the windows.

It might stop the fog, Tane thought, but it wouldn’t stop them.

His mother screamed when she saw them. A mixture of fear, delight, and relief. She hugged Tane, and his father hugged Fatboy just as fiercely. Then she hugged Fatboy and Tane’s father embraced him. Both his parents were crying and trying to talk about visits from the police and the fog all at once. Then his mother hugged Rebecca, and after an initial hesitation Rebecca’s arms crept around his mother and held on tightly for a surprisingly long time.

Xena scrambled over to a chair at the side of the hall. A group of children surrounded her, laughing and playing with her.

After a few moments, the outpouring of emotion started to get a bit uncomfortable for Tane, but it was still another ten minutes before he could get a word in.

Rebecca joined them then, and his dad made a small circle of chairs at one end of the hall for them to sit in.

The others ignored them, lost in their own soft conversations and dramas.

Over the next hour, as the twilight dripped away into darkness, they told his father and mother everything. They started with Lake Sunnyvale and left out nothing of importance up to their trip home with Private Shaw.

There was silence for a long while after that. The light from the bulbs skimmed across the faces of the carvings cleaving deep shadows out of the somber expressions.

Fatboy and Tane knew not to speak, and Rebecca seemed to have nothing to say.

His dad drew in a long slow breath after a while and looked deeply into each of their eyes in turn.

The silence lengthened until Tane broke it. “There are places for you on the submarine. You can hide out with us until the fog passes over.”

His father looked at his mother, and Tane saw a small shake of the head pass between them. His father gestured around at the room. Children jumped and danced around the chimpanzee, with happy faces, unknowing of the terror that approached. A young couple with a newborn baby sat, just out of earshot, lost in each other and the child. Three old women, dressed in black with matching black headscarves, sat a few feet away, toothlessly chewing up every word.

“You would have us leave, and yet our family, our whanau, stay?” His father shook his head.

Tane said heavily, “Then you must run. The meeting hall won’t protect you.”

Fatboy said, “Get every car you can get, or buses if you can find them. Load everyone up and head south as fast and as far as you can.”

“It’s a sturdy old building,” his father said doubtfully.

“We have seen these creatures up close,” Tane said, struggling to stop himself from crying out in exasperation. “You have to run, or everyone here will die!”

His father closed his eyes. His mother reached out and took his hand in hers.

His father asked, “Can this thing be stopped? Now that it has started?”

Tane shook his head uncertainly, but Fatboy nodded.

“Rebecca thinks there may be a way,” he said.

They all looked at her, her eyes on the floor, her shoulders hunched as if carrying a heavy load. She was, Tane thought. She had been carrying her burden for too long now.

“Maybe it’s for the best. From a purely scientific point of view,” she said, “once we humans are gone, this planet will be able to heal itself, and then when it is healthy once again, maybe in millions of years’ time, the human race can start over. Like a forest fire, cleaning out the congestion and decay, so new life can sprout amid the ashes.”

Tane started to argue, but his father held up a hand for silence. “You really believe we are a disease,” he said.

Rebecca stared at the floor. “A biologist would describe us as a plague.”

There was a piano against the far wall of the hall, near the entrance. Xena struggled for a moment with Rebecca to be let loose, and then ran across to the piano, with a crowd of children trailing her like the tail of a comet. She jumped up onto the seat and began to hammer tunelessly at the keys. She looked around as if expecting applause.

His father stood and crossed to Rebecca. He placed a hand under her chin and lifted her head up to meet his. “Maybe in this new age, what you say has some truth, but it was not always so.”

“I know,” Rebecca responded, a tear welling up in the corner of her eye.

His father watched her silently for a moment.

“Do you understand the meaning of ‘Kaitiakitanga’?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not really.”

His father smiled. “You pakeha believe that land belongs to people. But we Maori believe that people belong to the land. We are tangata whenua—people of the land. It is our privilege, not our right, and with it comes a great responsibility: Kaitiakitanga.”

All were silent now, watching his father. Tane found his eyes wandering around the carvings of the ancestors that guarded the walls of the meeting house. He had a very real sense that they were watching him back.

His father said, “For thousands of years, we Maori have guarded and protected our environment. Replenished and replaced what we used. But then the pakeha came to our land. We kaitiaki who should have stood up to the pakeha, who should have defended Papatuanuku—the Earth Mother—did not. Our voices fell silent.”

“Then you agree,” Rebecca said slowly. “Mankind must be destroyed before it destroys its host.”

“No.” His father’s voice was soft, little more than the breath of an infant, and yet somehow carried such intensity that the carvings of the ancestors seemed to quiver and come to life, carrying his words to all corners of the room. “We are a part of nature, creatures of Papatuanuku. Greed and stupidity are the disease, not us.”

The rest of the room had gathered around now, listening to the conversation.

“We can’t go back!” Rebecca cried out against him. “You cannot reverse a mutation. Human beings can’t go back to living in villages and farming kumara!”

“We cannot.” His father smiled sadly. “But we can learn to live with the trees and the lakes, the mountains and the seas, the fish and the animals, as family, as whanau, not as invaders, conquerors!”

There was a silence, and a breeze crept into the hall from outside, rustling the black plastic sheeting and reminding Tane that time was growing short.

“What can we do?” he asked quietly.

“What you know you must do,” his father said, and repeated it. “What you know you must.”

He sighed. “We live in a Western society, so we adopt Western ways, but we have never forgotten our culture.”

“I have,” Tane said painfully. “I have forgotten.”

My people. My culture. My whakapapa.

His father was silent for a moment. “No, son. You are Tane Williams, son of Rangitira Williams, grandson of Hemi Te Awa of the great Tuhoe tribe of Aotearoa. You have not forgotten your whakapapa, because you cannot forget. You have merely closed your eyes for a moment. And now they are open.” He placed a hand on Tane’s shoulder. “You will face this challenge, find a way to defeat it, then show the rest of the world’s people the way forward. The way of the kaitiaki.

“You will lead the people, all of the world’s people, into a new age. Te Kenehi Tuarua—the second genesis. You must teach the ways of kaitiakitanga if the world is to survive. We must all become kaitiaki.”

He turned from Tane and addressed the room, “They call me a disease, but I am not. I am a child of the land. I am tangata whenua. I am a spiritual guardian of the Earth Mother. I am kaitiaki!”

There was a silence, and Tane felt that ancient spirits were repeating his father’s words, whispering them to one another.

Fatboy rose and placed his hand on his father’s arm. From an inside pocket in his jacket, he produced the patu pounamu, the greenstone club their parents had given each of them at Christmas. He pressed it against his heart. “Neither am I an illness. I am tangata whenua. I am kaitiaki.”

There was a murmuring amongst the gathered crowd that subsided only when Tane rose, a little awkwardly, to his feet. He spoke quietly but his voice was clear.

“I, too, am tangata whenua. I am kaitiaki.” The room seemed to fade into blackness around him, and he looked only into the face of his father.

“I am Maori.”